


Fuck Paperwork

by atomiccourier



Series: Atom I.C. Courier [3]
Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Gen, You're gonna work yourself to death dude, arcade is only there for like three or four paragraphs but he exists
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-04
Updated: 2016-04-04
Packaged: 2018-05-31 05:44:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6458212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atomiccourier/pseuds/atomiccourier
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Atom struggles with part of being Vegas's mayor, made harder by his brain injury. Arcade helps.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fuck Paperwork

You don’t write on paper often, preferring the condensed keyboard that slicks with a clack out of your pip-boy when you decide what has transpired is worth recalling. You learned how to type before you learned how to write, and when you first did so, on a napkin in the Sierra Madre when the aforementioned keyboard was stuck, it was so awkward and slow that you didn’t even bother to finish the task. Even now, when you find yourself bringing pen to paper, the slowness gives you headaches and allows the memory of what you were writing to slide away, while your handwriting is clearly a jumbled oversized mimicry of common rob-co fonts.

So here, at 3:27 AM in the Presidential Suite of the Lucky 38 at the overlong kitchen table, you struggle to pen even a single sentence, hand stuttering like your brain while you switch back and forth between paper scrap and pip-boy screen, overlooking the point of your message, looking to the page, realizing the next word you have to write is hard to spell, looking back to your pip-boy screen to type it out so that the autocorrect applies, looking back to the paper and writing it out, rereading the sentence to find out what the next word is supposed to be, looking back to your pip-boy screen, et cetera.

Your migraine doesn’t help, and you don’t know how much of it is from dehydration, but because the human mind only has five to seven (if you remember right, which you probably don’t) places to remember things in short term memory. You can’t think too much about your thirst, because you’ll lose what trains of thought you have tied to this letter. You look down at the script. What are you writing again? Damnit. The tan lines on your face scrunch up with your brow, and you bring a thumb and forefinger up to massage the bridge of your nose. Only now you’ve moved your forearm enough to make your pip-boy fall asleep, so you wake it up and try fruitlessly to find the draft for this thing in the masses of files.

Your muddled concentration (if it can be called that) is interrupted when a bottle of (purified) water is placed in onto the table before you. It and the hand holding it loosely by the cap effectively block your view of the screen and your work. Your eyes trail up the offending arm to it’s owner. You respond by trying to check the pip-boy for the time, when he moves his hand to push the offending device down and away from your field of view while he sits down in the chair beside you.

“Let me guess. You got thirsty, came in here to get something to drink, brought your paperwork with you so you wouldn’t lose your train of thought, and instead forgot to get anything for yourself, thereby defeating the purpose.” You nod, because that sounds just like you, and his mouth quirk and brow furrow tell you he’s not surprised;  and feels like he’s taking care of a toddler, which you may as well be.

You’d ask him what he’s doing up, but this feels familiar enough so you figure you’ve got the answer written down somewhere already. So instead you take what you plan on being a few swallows of water from the bottle as you uncap it, but as it hits your tongue your body decides it’s going to down half of it in one go. You feel his eyes on you and grin, which makes a bead of water leak down to your chin. He wipes it off with his thumb in an obvious flirtation, leaving his pale color as a dot in it’s place.

A few minutes later, an empty bottle makes a too-loud crumbling sound as it’s crushed and tossed into a recycling bin. (courtesy of the new mayor in town) You imagine your insides would make a similar sound at how you retract yourself when he clicks his tongue at what could be either your still-made bed or your absolute dumping ground of a work area. Either way, it’s a completely different sound when you’re settling into the sheets, exhausted and slightly delirious from the day’s work enough to welcome to sweet release of sleep, while he breathes a sigh of relief beside you.

**Author's Note:**

> I blame The Great Gatsby for my vocab in this.
> 
> I hope I characterized Arcade right.
> 
> Thank you tumblr user histanaifantasma for beta-ing!


End file.
